The Ducks support university creativity awards

Danny and Matt were at UEL (University of East London) this week as they presented awards at the Creative Futures Ceremony.

Matt and Danny presented a variety of prizes to students of UEL for their work during the academic year, which included an Award for outstanding individual production by Jerome Defreitas with his Student Bursary project.

The project was rewarded for its wonderful design sense, and his first class efforts to go beyond the module brief. We are also pleased to announce that from next week Jerome will be working at the Cyber-Duck offices for a 3 month placement as a Design Intern. There was also an award for Stuart Norman and Matt Radbourne for their outstanding level three research and innovative production; Affected-Ed.

Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader at UEL, Dr Tony.D.Sampson was delighted with the awards ceremony, stating:

"It was wonderful to celebrate our Multimedia Design Technology and Interactive Media Design student successes, particularly with Danny and Matt from Cyber-Duck giving out the prizes. In addition to the thrill of prize-winning this was also an ideal opportunity for us to share our excitement regarding the new School of Arts and Digital Industries and collaborate with our industry friends on some exciting developments to our undergraduate provision.”

This week, Matt Gibson contributed to marketingmanagersInfo.co.uk with an article about how to create an SEO friendly website, and the best techniques for improving your websites search engine visibility. In the article Matt talks about the importance of unique website content and the best ways of helping search engines understand what your pages are about.

industry news

After last months hack attacks on the Playstation network, Sony have had even more bad news to address after hacker group LulzSec posted information it took from Sony Entertainment and Sony BMG on its site. The hackers said they broke into servers that run SonyPictures.com and took the email addresses and passwords of around 1 million users. This is even more bad news for what has been a chaotic time for Sony, and now the whole world will be looking to see how they react to the issue.

A researcher has decided to try and make Skype an open source platform by reverse engineering the protocol the service uses. The un-named hacker claimed he has already achieved the feat on his blog and provided the source code for versions 1.x/3.x/4.x of Skype as well as details of the rc4 layer arithmetic encoding the service uses. However it is now likely that Microsoft, who recently purchased Skype, will take legal action and have the blog post removed.

New rules governing the webs newest top level domains are expected to be finalised this month by ICANN. The new rules will mean that any company will be able to register an extension to replace their .com domain such as .hotel or .car. Industry experts believe this will provide a real competitive advantage for companies that adopt the scheme, who will also be able to register their brand names, such as .nike or .apple.

Let's work together

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